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Oklahoma Tornado Donations Map

One of our goals here at Recovers is to help communities be more prepared for disasters by learning from our data and sharing that knowledge with the rest of the world. This past year, our software was used to help the recovery efforts in Moore, OK, after the EF-5 tornado ripped through the town on May 20, 2013.

Mapping the Donations

Plotted by zipcode, below is a map of the donation items offered on the Moore.Recovers.org website during the city’s recovery effort. The size of the plotted circle increases with the amount of donations offered from that zipcode.

What can you learn from this map?

Looking at the map, there are a few things that we can learn:

Develop satellite donation collection areas in surrounding areas. Only 55% of the donations came from within a 25 mile radius of the affected area. That means that about half of the donations came far outside the area. Creating satellite donation collection areas in the cities and counties surrounding the affected area should be done before disasters happen.

Coordinate and share your preparedness and recovery plans with the large cities surrounding your area. Donations outside of the affected area were clustered in Tulsa and Dallas-Fort Worth. This means that surrounding large cities can play a significant role in helping your community recover and should be utilized to their full extent.

Create a plan on how you are going to handle collecting donations from areas very far away. Donations were offered from as far as New York. It is also important to develop a way to inform the public about your plans for collecting (or not collecting) these distant donations.

Hopefully this information will help your community stay better prepared for future emergencies. Feel free to post a comment or ask a question below! Additionally, you can get in touch with us at https://recovers.org/contact!

About Chris

Chris Kuryak is the Chief Operating Officer at Recovers.
He holds a masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. He was the President of the MIT Film Club and on the staff of the MIT Clean Energy Prize. He worked for four years at Athena Manufacturing in Austin, Texas after receiving a B.S. from the University of Texas at Austin. He spends his free time working on independent films, playing videogames, and traveling.